This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik announced she’d raised $5.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 on the heels of her antisemitism hearing that led to the resignations of two university presidents. The winter haul brings her 2023 fundraising to over $13 million after she pledged to deliver $100 million to help New York Republicans win their congressional races. Stefanik will be working hard to ensure that GOP gains in the state aren’t lost, and a little extra money in the bank won’t hurt.

The music has stopped and Harry Bronson has settled into a new power chair. The Rochesterian is the new chair of the powerful Labor Committee. Upstate lawmakers made out well with economic and workforce development gavels in this game of musical chairs, with Syracuse’s Al Stirpe taking Bronson’s old post atop the economic development panel and Saratoga’s Carrie Woerner taking the small business chair, after a year heading the libraries committee. Taking over the stacks for Woerner is Schenectady’s Angelo Santabarbara.

Over a two day period, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced partial budget restorations to a handful of city agencies – police, fire, sanitation, and parks. Given the mayor’s emphasis on public safety and cleanliness, these particular reversals are perhaps unsurprising (given they were attached to cuts to police and fire hiring, litter basket removals, and a popular park-cleaning program) but all the same there will no doubt be many questions about the mayor’s decision making in the days and weeks to come. As the UFT recently put it, “Hmmm. Looks like the mayor found some $$$.”

Gary Jenkins may be out of the New York City Department of Social Services, but he’s not out of the headlines. A new report from the Department of Investigation found that the former commissioner violated city policy by displaying “a lack of full transparency,” delaying to disclose serious legal violations amid the early days of the influx of migrants. Jenkins, who now works at Frank Carone’s consulting firm, may be saying he believes the investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, but it certainly doesn’t paint a flattering picture.

It took three years after the repeal of a law that kept police misconduct records from the public, but the Suffolk County Police Department must now hand those records over the New York Civil Liberties Union. That’s a big loss for Lou Civello, president of the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association, and his members. Police unions have fought tooth and nail to delay or prevent the release of as many disciplinary and complaint records as possible since the repeal of the 50a law that kept them private.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chair Janno Lieber spoke too soon after a Jan. 4 subway derailment in Manhattan when he described such incidents as “exceedingly rare.” Well, he saw that statement derailed when another train ran off the tracks in Coney Island on Wednesday. He might have gotten away with just saying derailments were “rare,” except a third one happened on Dec. 20, again in Coney Island. Lieber only wanted to reassure straphangers about the safety of the subways. Ending this streak of derailments would accomplish that.